The Museum Folkwang, in cooperation with, and with the support of the Wüstenrot Stiftung, is organizing an exhibition and symposium on the theme of teaching photography in order to encourage discussion on photographic training in Europe. The exhibition presents the artistic work of six teachers, complemented by a projection of their students’ photographs and videos. The selection concentrated on art photography and thus follows a development in which applied photography is increasingly losing importance in training. The symposium offers the possibility of getting to know and to discuss various opportunities for training and teaching methods in European institutions. Through exchanges concerning the works shown, new formats and partnerships should arise on the interface of university, museum and public.

Parallel to Next 1, a new platform for curators, critics and photographers, the exhibition will contribute to placing the Ruhrgebiet in the Cultural Capital year RUHR.2010 in the focus of support for new photographic talents.

While Paul Seawright (University of Ulster, Belfast) employs photography to describe everyday social realities, Olivier Richon (Royal College of Art, London) uses the precise depiction for allegorical presentations. Gisela Bullacher (Folkwang Universität, Essen) develops individual images and series from the perception of quite different motifs. Isolated against a neutral background, she leads us to the special formal character of the world of things. Johannes Schwartz (Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam) and Susanne Brügger (Fachhochschule Dortmund) delve into questions of the search for meaning, the relation between ideas, depiction and forms of presentation. And Koka Ramishvili (Tbilisi State Academy of Art, Tiflis) works with moving pictures. In his videos, existing news material is formally re-worked and refocused in terms of content or the viewer is confronted with its protagonists’ unusual actions.

Further well-known photo-experts such as Patrick Talbot (École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles), David Bate (University of Westminster, London) and Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague) will be guests at the Teaching Photography symposium.

Published with the exhibition and the symposium is a catalogue (Ger./Eng.), 146 pages with numerous illustrations, 8 Euro in the Museum.